Announcing the end of DACA, the attorney general was serially dishonest.

September 5, 2017

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“We are people of compassion—and we are people of laws,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared Tuesday morning, with a bizarre and inappropriate smirk. Sessions twitched that nervous smirk multiple times as he announced President Trump’s decision to “rescind” President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals 2012 executive order. That was the tell: Trump’s DACA rescission is a sop to his white-nativist base, and it represents the pinnacle of Sessions’s otherwise undistinguished political career. Trump sent out his battered political spouse, the man he repeatedly suggested ought to resign, to take a victory lap on Tuesday, and Sessions couldn’t hide his joy.

But it was also a move that Trump was unwilling to announce himself. Which is odd, given that it was such a big promise to his base during the 2016 campaign. Instead of basking in the glory of a rare moment—Trump hasn’t been able to keep many campaign promises so far, not repealing and replacing Obamacare, not building his wall on the border with Mexico, not tax reform—the cowardly Trump sent out his attorney general. Despite it being his magic moment, Sessions also behaved in a cowardly fashion, fleeing reporters’ questions after his relatively brief announcement, which was studded with legal errors that would shame a better attorney general (or any better person, actually). With apparent reluctance, Sessions wound down his remarks by acknowledging that the federal government will allow time to “conduct an orderly change, to create a time period for Congress to act, if they so choose.”

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Apparently, Trump thinks it’s a win-win to punt to Congress: He gets credit from his base for ending DACA, while he shifts the blame for ruining the lives of 800,000 by-definition law-abiding Americans to his congressional “allies.” Will it work? Only if the media continue to portray Trump as being “sympathetic to the plight of the young immigrants,” as though he is genuinely sympathetic to anyone but himself, and a few, but not all, of his family members.

Sessions used no dog whistles; he brought his bullhorn, making a series of incorrect and/or dishonest claims in his 10-minute remarks. He repeatedly used the deplorable term “illegal aliens.” He insisted DACA “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens,” the core of white-nativist complaints about any new legal status for undocumented individuals. He insisted DACA was “unconstitutional,” which is widely contested. He said its beneficiaries were “mostly adult”; they may be now, but they had to be brought here before 2007, when they were under 16. He claimed they were a drain on the economy; they bolster it: 95 percent either hold jobs or are in school. DACA, Sessions said, “has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism;” of course recipients can have no criminal record, and if they commit a crime, they have to leave.

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It’s true that DACA was facing legal challenge from red-state attorneys general, led by right-wing Texas AG Ken Paxton. Those challenges might have prevailed, at least temporarily. But Sessions made it known he would not defend the order against his red-state brothers, and so Trump sent him out to announce the rescission, while also allowing a six-month window for those legislative masters, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to come up with some semblance of a humane alternative.

That may be possible—if moderate Republicans, along with those from increasingly Latino districts, were willing to team up with Democrats, there would likely be the votes for an alternative to expelling more than 800,000 DREAMers from our shores. But that was also true of the bipartisan comprehensive immigration-reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013; had the House GOP leadership put the bill on the floor, it almost certainly would have passed. Who expects Paul Ryan to have that kind of courage?

Maybe some of the Beltway pundits who’ve mislabeled Ryan a policy wonk and a legislative master. But nobody who’s watched Ryan can expect leadership here. In the last 24 hours, he’s come out against Trump’s planned DACA rescission while also defending it, saying it “fulfills a promise” to Trump’s base. Meanwhile, Representative Steve King, who years ago boasted that his racist anti-immigrant stance was mainstream in his party, is furious that Trump gave an extra six months to allow supporters of “amnesty” to come up with an alternative to mass deportation. And the head of Trump’s election-fraud commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, told Fox and Friends on Tuesday that “there’s nothing wrong with asking people to go home” now, and suggested that if such a move splits up families, the relatives of DACA recipients who have legal status should volunteer to return home with their undocumented family members. That’s Kobach’s idea of “family unification.” He still runs Trump’s commission, of course.

So I’m not optimistic that the Republican Congress will do the right thing and legalize the DREAMers. If Congress doesn’t act, roughly 275,000 DACA recipients—soldiers, teachers, fathers, paramedics, students—will lose legal status on by March 5, 2018. That would make for a colorful backdrop to the midterm elections. It’s even possible that Trump will extend his DACA deadline again, if the prevailing political winds suggest that’s a smart move. All we know, today, is that Jeff Sessions had a good morning, and Trump is happy to dump the fate of almost a million young people into the laps of his supposed congressional allies. This will be ugly.

Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent, is the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.

The photo's great. Makes me think Sessions has just finished his favorite dish: cleaning out the toilet bowl. Yes, it be know, the smug little thing likes to eat it, all his life. Buttoning his jacket, he does the acts no one else will, and sure digs. it. Yes, it's ugly. It is intended that way.

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Susan Benton says:

September 7, 2017 at 9:57 pm

For the record, not all illegal immigrants are from Mexico.
Many are from countries south of Mexico. Regardless of where they
came from many are families who
are escaping drug cartel violence
and attempts by cartels to recruit innocent children into their activities.

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Michael Barrsays:

September 6, 2017 at 2:43 pm

Among many other noxious attributes, Trump is a coward. Too afraid to make the unpopular announcement himself, he kicked the can over to Congress while not even indicating what he now feels is the proper policy for 800,000 lives hanging in the balance. Kick them all out, as he promised in his ugly campaign or show some semblance of decency since he "loves" these souls he's dispatched to limbo. Donald Trump is a very small man.

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Walter Pewensays:

September 6, 2017 at 12:24 pm

Brigitte is here. Give up all thoughts of a rational discussion. She will pontificate forever. Go to Breitbart, Brigette. The fatness of the place suits you well, you can use up air and space there easily. Here you are restrained--most of us actually CARE.

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Brigitte Meiersays:

September 6, 2017 at 5:08 am

Joan Walsh as usual only laments the whine of the Democrats. What she doesn't include in her rant is that DACA encourages families with young children to immigrate illegally into the US, in view that since their children were brought as young children, they will be able to stay and you can't of course leave a 2year old alone in the US - i.e. the parents also have to be given legal papers. DACA is an incentive to illegal immigration. If Trump wants to reduce illegal immigration, the yes, DACA has to be stopped.

Illegal immigrants know that hey came illegally and can be deported. Sometimes you wonder to what extent they respect their own children that they put them into such a conundrum of bureaucracy.

It is also clear that if the children are illegal aliens and are deported, that the parents would have to go with them. You would expect that parents take care of their children, all the more after they put them into this illegal situation.

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Eric Paul Jacobsensays:

September 6, 2017 at 8:53 am

The "conundrum of bureaucracy" of which you speak, Brigitte, is something that we ourselves have created. If it were as easy to immigrate legally as you seem to believe, everybody would immigrate legally. *** Migration is the only way for mobility of labor to compensate for the mobility of capital in a global economy that we have unwisely rigged to favor investors over workers everywhere. Or of that sentence is too hard for you to understand, try the next one. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator (not by your dear federal bureaucracy, Brigitte) with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A federal bureaucracy that denies these liberties is in the wrong, Brigitte, yet you insist on defending the bureaucracy and blaming its victims. You seem to be wasting what little intelligence you have justifying a prejudice – xenophobia – that you would do much better without.

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Steven Falksays:

September 6, 2017 at 2:27 am

Defending the right of these young people goes to the heart of any greatness this country has ever had. They represent the ancestors of every one of us in this country who is not genetically completely Native American. If previous governments had enacted such a mean, cruel, inhuman order, completely contrary to the interests of this country, practically none of us would be here.

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Betsy Smithsays:

September 5, 2017 at 4:48 pm

This administration is not just deplorable; it is shameful and despicable.

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Brigitte Meiersays:

September 6, 2017 at 5:15 am

I don't think so. Repealing DACA is way more honest than to oblige young Latino men to join the army to get legal papers. This kind of paying for mercenaries with a carrot, when they may be completely unable to make use of their legal status after military service, is at best cynical.

Leaving immigration unchecked will lead to over population of the US and with the increasing expense of living costs, more and more instability.

Immigrants are not naturally an asset. They have different expectations and ways of life without laws. It is difficult for them to adjust to a lawful way of life. The problem is not only crime, but to give an example: many immigrants who in time buy a house together with their relatives renovate that house in illegal ways to sell it again later on. The buyer cannot know how much was not done to code and often becomes unknowingly the victim of structural and electrical problems that can be fatal or very costly to remedy. Same for cars and other aspects of daily life.

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Michael Robertsonsays:

September 5, 2017 at 3:59 pm

We will see them push harder to lower standards for ICE so they can add thousands of even more unqualified jarheads to the force. It will be a national disaster unless a war with N. Korea overshadows it. A perfect storm is brewing.

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Brigitte Meiersays:

September 6, 2017 at 5:20 am

There won't be a war with North Korea. That is not feasible. It would result in WW3 since Russia and China will go to the defense of North Korea. The US in turn cannot win against Asia combined and risks to pay way too dearly for such a loss. Don't
forget the $21t debt and China introducing a gold backed currency. That will decimate the dollar as reserve currency and with it the US economy. That gold backed currency is a much larger problem for the USA than North Korea.

The North Korean problem could be solved very easily with common sense, by accepting North Korea as it is. No nation will give up its deterrent when threatened daily with invasion, annihilation and regime change. Stop these threats and instead accept that North Korea has right to self determination free of US interference and the entire problem disappears.

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Richard Danielssays:

September 6, 2017 at 11:32 am

The North Korea problem could be solved with common sense? Look at who's sitting in the White House. Using the term "common sense" in the same sentence while discussing Trump is something I thought I'd never hear.